Dilip Simeon's blog

NB: The Prime Minister of India is actually campaigning for this gang, beholden to criminals and convicts lodged in jail. He and his Sangh Parivar can do this and still talk about their superior brand of patriotism. Deceit and double-speak know no bounds. Let us see how long Indian citizens will take it. DS An image can sometimes be more powerful than a thousand election stories. So, to get an idea of what is happening in Punjab, picture a meeting of Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) leaders. Behold a few dozen of them sitting in a jail in Fazilka, a Punjab district on the Radcliffe Line, listening in rapt attention to Shiv Lal Doda, a liquor baron facing murder charges. Imagine the liquor baron holding his  darbar , holding forth on election strategies, while the Akalis, who have driven up to the jail in a cavalcade of SUVs, courtesy and nod and a senior police official stands guard to ensure the  deewan-e-khas  is not disturbed. Imagine the desperation of the Akalis...

Three forces carved the landscape of my life. Two of them crushed half the world. The third was very small and weak and, actually, invisible. It was a shy little bird hidden in my rib cage an inch or two above my stomach. Sometimes in the most unexpected moments the bird would wake up, lift its head, and flutter its wings in rapture. Then I too would lift my head because, for that short moment, I would know for certain that love and hope are infinitely more powerful than hate and fury, and that somewhere beyond the line of my horizon there was life indestructible, always triumphant. The first force was Adolf Hitler; the second, Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin. They made my life a microcosm in which the history of as small country in the heart of Europe was condensed. The little bird, the third force, kept me alive to tell the story...  I carry the past inside me folded up like an accordion, like a book of picture postcards that people bring home as souvenirs from foreign cities, s...

"How do you know I am mad?" said  Alice "You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here". Keith Olbermann: Donald Trump Is Not Of Sound Mind And Must Resign Oliver Wendell Holmes famously summed up Franklin Roosevelt as a second-class intellect but a first-class temperament. Trump has a third-class intellect and a third-class temperament. The frightening surreality of what has happened to the United States has only begun to sink in. Trump’s Presidency Is the Twilight Zone Episode About a Terrifying 6-Year-Old If there was some lingering hope among Republican professionals that Donald Trump would somehow, as the old cliché has it, “grow” into the office, his first 48 hours as president dispelled it immediately. The White House is already jittery with fright at the unpredictability of a childlike figure who has been handed terrifying powers, like the famous  Twilight Zone  episode  about a 6-year-old-boy with magical abilities. T...

The Captive Mind (1953) has been compared to the two most revealing and penetrating works on the same subject previously published - Arthur Koestler's  Darkness at Noon  (1940) and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four  (1949). Milosz was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1980. Read an interview with him in 2003, the year before he died. The poem  Campo dei Fiori ,  his tribute to the victims of the Holocaust, was inspired by the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of 1943.  In the first book- length interview given to a Polish journalist (Ewa Czarnecka), Czeslaw Milosz , when asked about the fame brought about by the publication of his Zniewolony umysl ( The Captive Mind ) in 1953, responded with a shrug: "What sort of fame?" (CCM, 145). In the original Polish version that statement comes across even stronger, with an almost sardonic dismissal of the issue: "Taka to i slawa" (Some fame, indeed). And yet it cannot be denied that this happened to be a book...

Campo dei Fiori  By  CZESLAW MILOSZ   Translated by Louis Iribarne (Milosz's famous poem has been described as ' one of the most moving tributes to the Holocaust victims ever written. ') In Rome on the Campo dei Fiori  baskets of olives and lemons,  cobbles spattered with wine  and the wreckage of flowers.  Vendors cover the trestles  with rose-pink fish;  armfuls of dark grapes  heaped on peach-down.  On this same square  they burned Giordano Bruno.  Henchmen kindled the pyre  close-pressed by the mob.  Before the flames had died  the taverns were full again,  baskets of olives and lemons  again on the vendors' shoulders.  I thought of the Campo dei Fiori  in Warsaw by the sky-carousel  one clear spring evening  to the strains of a carnival tune.  The bright melody drowned  the salvos from the ghetto wall,...

The demonetisation of Rs 500 and Rs 1000 currency notes has dominated Indian lives since its announcement on November 8, 2016. Its shock-and-awe approach has created a sense of frisson amongst Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s acolytes. However, for many who owe no allegiance to specific political dispensations, it has not been possible to accept the stated objectives at face value.  The case for robust skepticism towards demonetisation as a means of tackling the scourge of black money has been effectively made by many writers and economists. But more than the views of the critics, it is the government’s constantly shifting goalposts that makes us discount the putative justification for such a drastic policy decision. In the early weeks, the absence of a clear understanding on the true motive of such a radical monetary measure has led to much speculation that was akin to Kremlin watching during the Cold War era. Some have plausibly seen sudden demonetisation as an attempt to d...

The defence counsel in the Maruti factory arson and rioting case – in which a general manager Avnish Dev was brutally beaten and was burnt to death – presented significant challenges to the prosecution case at a Gurgaon court on January 23. Following the incident, the Haryana police had later arrested 148 people in connection with it. Appearing for the accused, senior advocate Rebecca John argued that from dramatically changing the weapons of offence as stated in the FIR, to not being able to prove who started the fire and how a matchbox, cited as evidence, was found completely intact in a burnt down room – the police had done everything to fabricate and embellish the case. Her arguments also projected the prosecution, which had completed its arguments, in poor light. While 148 workers have been charged in connection with the grievous crime and nine of them are still behind bars, the prosecution has not been able to buttress its allegations with solid evidence. Apar...